The slogan "Montevideo, your home" used by the Municipality of Montevideo (Uruguay) between 1991 and 2006, serves as a starting point for the analysis of modern ways taking over the urban public sphere.The city, scene of modernity, shows the indistinction between the public and private spaces from the emergency of social dimension, the consolidation of nation state and the configuration of political economy as an index of reality.Thereby, the politics will be reduced to the management and administration of population's needs, and life in biological terms will have a central role, key factor to the organization of a public space that is presented as an extension of the domestic sphere.The process of modernization of Montevideo is taken in this article to account for the effects of contemporary policies ruled by the primacy of the economy and which seem to reduce the distinctions between public and domestic spaces to an issue of size or scale, having as a correlate a biologization of the public life and therefore of the politics.